by Jill Barnett
“Come on, kids,” I said to Phil and Molly. “We’ll meet you at the top.” We boarded over to the lift, stepped out of our back bindings, and sat down as it took off.
From the chair, I could see the open horizon, the vast landscape for hundreds of miles. Home was out there somewhere, but far beyond the slight scope of my human eye. The sun was lowering into the west and outlining the rim of land in the distance orange, and the edges of sky were beginning to turn bright colors. Behind us, the lake was an enormous glasslike sea of fresh blue water surrounded by cold mountain peaks fading into lavender in the waning light, and ahead of us was an almost indefinable wall of stark, blindingly white snow and steep runs. The air had grown colder, but there was no wind, and I felt my daughter shiver, so I rested my hand on her thigh.
We, who always had so much to say about anything and everything, said nothing for a few minutes, but seemed to collectively watch our breath fog into the cold air as we climbed to the top on a high-speed quad . . .then Phillip began to hum. In the Ghetto.
I laughed. Before I could tell him how awful he was, Molly was singing about a cold Chicago morn. I joined in, and we sang at the very tops of our lungs, loud and obnoxious and mostly out of tune, trying to either out-sing or keep up with each other. Soon I heard Scott’s deep voice, off-key just like his dad’s in the shower, and Mickey, too, singing as loudly as we all were, butchering the melody, forgetting the words and half laughing.
I believe we sang with the hope that the air above us would somehow carry our voices up higher than the sky and more reverberant than a mountain echo. In the sheer stupidness of what we were doing, I was overcome by the oddest sense of joy. There was no show of strength now, no façade or convention or need to act like we were completely sane. It was one of those who cared? moments that Mike would have loved.
Somewhere close to ten thousand feet, where a blue net spread out from the sides of the chair platform and over the sharp and deadly drop straight down, we slid off, our boards on icy ground again, still singing verses we didn’t really know, though our voices were hoarse and fading. But we still laughed, stumbling into our boards and circling around each other in a ring of flat and final notes, smiles that had been lost to us suddenly creasing our faces.
At the end of my life, when I am almost gone from this earth, I know I will remember that moment of absolute joy as I stood with my children, high on a mountain that divided two states. The awkwardness I’d been feeling for days waned, and a strange sense of peace seemed to hold me in its arms.
Scott squatted down and pulled a bottle of Mike’s favorite wine from his backpack, stood and opened it, then said, “Here’s to Dad.” He took a swig and passed it around.
“I gave you paper cups,” Molly said. “Where are they?”
“I left them in the car. Hell, we’re family. We have the same cooties.”
“Cooties? God, Scott. How old are you?” Molly asked sarcastically.
“I have a six year old. She affects my vocabulary.” He looked at his brother. “What’s your excuse, Phil?”
“Brain damage. You beat me up too much when I was a kid and there was that time you punched me in the head and I had to get stitches.” Phil handed the bottle to Molly. “Here, I don’t have any communicable diseases. Is there something you want to tell us, Midget?”
She rolled her eyes and shook her head, stepping out of any bantering with her brothers and raising the wine bottle, and as she did so, her face grew serious and her emotion was raw and open for us to see. Since she had lost her father, my daughter the photographer had a constant case of red-eye. “To Daddy.”
We were quiet again when she finished, and it was then that I noticed Mickey standing awkwardly outside our circle. “Come here, love.” I held out my arm and he moved close. I put my hand around his thin waist and handed him the bottle. “Here. It’s okay.”
“No backwash, kid,” Phil warned. “That’s not a bottle of Orange Crush.”
“Bite me,” Mickey said. “To Dad.” He took a long swig of wine that brought tears to his eyes and a flush to his cheeks when he lowered the bottle. He was seventeen, and had no palate yet, though we’d served him wine during holiday dinners. He’d always left most of it in the glass and Mike usually finished it off. “I’m not going to waste that wine,” he’d say. “Why do you pour it for him?”
“Because he doesn’t need to feel ostracized.”
“But he doesn’t drink it!”
“You’ll drink it. Besides, I don’t really care. I won’t make him feel left out. You’re the parent. You should be happy he doesn’t drink it.”
“That logic doesn’t fly with me. If it were beer, the kid would have chugged down the whole thing.”
Mike seemed to have completely forgotten that back in 1968 he drank Red Mountain for a buck a bottle.
We finished the bottle, Phillip making more wisecracks so he wouldn’t get emotional and lose it in front of us all. But he had a tough second or two when he toasted his “Pop” so I took his hand in mine as I saw my other children look down or away. There was something about seeing Phil hurting that struck each of us deeply. Maybe because he was the Cantrell who worked so hard to cover up what he was feeling.
I held out the wood box to Scott. “Here. Let’s open it.”
We all stared at the bottom of the sealed box.
“How do we open it?”
Phil removed the wine cork and handed the corkscrew to Scott.
As I watched him break the seal, something inside of me seemed to unwind. Maybe to strangers the irreverence of laughing over an Elvis urn and using a corkscrew to open an ash container would seem horrid and tacky and disrespectful. But Mike had the blackest sense of humor. He needed one to grow up with a man like Don Cantrell as his father. That black humor was one of Mike’s most valuable legacies to us, so somehow what we had done and that we could laugh at our malediction seemed right.
Once open, we all looked into the box, uneasy, but morbidly curious. It was a wooden box filled with tan-gray ash that almost looked like sand.
“It’s time to do this.” I said, turning away with a rush of mixed emotions, and we moved over to the edge of the run.
Scott handed Mike to me. “You go first, Mom.”
I touched the fine ash and closed my eyes. I don’t want to let go . . . I don’t want to let go . . . . I could feel the tears burning up my throat, I could feel so intensely my love, my respect, and my need for that man swelling up from deep inside of me, so I just leaned over the edge of the run and jumped outward, pulling my knees up to my chest as I had done that first time on a snowboard so long, long ago, and I tilted the box behind me as I flew through the air.
South Lake Tahoe is a strange and beautiful mess of a place. Not much can bruise the grandeur of the lake or the magnificence of a Sierra mountain against a backdrop of those unending skies. Nature often revealed its most profound beauty there.
The television show Bonanza was partially filmed on the northeastern side of the lake, and the old set of the Ponderosa complete with a western town and a replicated ranch house was a tourist destination for over twenty five years, until the property became too valuable to leave undeveloped.
When the kids were young, for the price of admission you could see a medicine wagon show, take a walk through Hoss’ mine, and buy a fancy black hat with a silver studded hatband just like Little Joe’s. I read somewhere once that the original show was created by RCA to sell more TVs in the 1950s, and it went on to become one of the longest running television series in history. But it’s gone now and lost to whole generations who have never heard of the Cartwrights.
Our family has a significant, almost innate history with the lake, and we bought our place there because Tahoe really was our second home—where Mike sold his first boards in the ski area parking lot long before snowboarding even had a name—and we loved it there.
Nestled into a private plot of wooded mountain with northwestern views of the lake and surroun
ding Sierras, the house is hidden from sight and doesn’t corrupt the landscape. You would never know it was there until you turn off Kingsbury Grade onto a private road flanked by a statuesque forest of tamarack pines. Our home is made in the lodge style and constructed from recycled wood, glass, and stone, with four rock fireplaces and a two story wood-beamed great room supporting six-foot wide iron chandeliers salvaged from a silver baron’s old hunting lodge, and has enough bedrooms and high-end energy efficient baths for everyone to have their own space.
When Mike first bought SkiStar, the brand name needed a boost after straddling the hurdles of bankruptcy restructure, so in the name of publicity, our privacy was compromised and the Tahoe house filled the pages of a winter issue of Architectural Digest. I remember opening the magazine to a huge glossy photo of our great room with me sitting on the sectional and Mike standing behind me, his hand on my shoulder. On the day the photos were taken, there had been photographers and assistants, light meters and reflective shades everywhere, and their makeup artist pasted enough pancake make-up on me to make my face crack if I smiled.
Our mountain home was and always has been a haven for us, and I never quite got rid of my urge to run out and burn every issue I could find. I never told Mike, but the day the magazine hit the stands I bought up every copy at the neighborhood market and tossed them in the recycler. (I think now I wish I had those magazines, just to see his hand on my shoulder again.)
But the truth is I’m just not a public person and never relished being in the spotlight. The artist in me is private and would prefer to be locked away in my garret.
My friend Ellie would say I’m an idiot. “Think of the exposure. It is perfect for company publicity.” Which was just my point; in my mind exposure is not a positive word. But then Ellie was Bariella Crocker Hutcheonson, pedigreed, driven and smart, and over the years she’d made solidifying her position as one of San Francisco’s leading socialites her own artistic endeavor.
On Saturday morning I was up early in the huge kitchen of the Tahoe house and making buckwheat pancakes for my brood, who gobbled down breakfast and went off to the mountain to watch the day’s qualifying runs. Renee had stayed home with the kids, who were all still asleep. Not long after my children took off, Miranda came downstairs in a flannel nightgown and bunny slippers and asked, “Is Daddy gone?”
“He just left, Sweetpea.”
“Tyler’s still asleep and Mama’s sick again.”
When Renee arrived the day before she looked gray and peaked, and she was quiet at dinner and went to bed right after the kids. So I set Miranda at the table with a Mickey Mouse shaped pancake, a bowl of berries to make his face, and a bottle of syrup and I went upstairs. Scott’s family took up the suite of rooms at the north end of the house, and I knocked quietly on their door, then opened it. “Renee?”
The bed was empty, the covers thrown back. I could hear her vomiting in the bathroom. She came out, and I was sitting on the bed. The expression on her face was resigned.
“Well,” I said, “that look tells me what I wanted to know. I was going to ask you if you wanted herb tea and toast, or ginger ale and crackers. I take it you want the ginger ale and crackers.” She had that gray morning-sickness pallor any woman who’s ever been pregnant can easily spot.
“Oh, God, Mom, I don’t dare eat anything. I’m so sick this time.” She was half crying.
I wanted to know the due date, but didn’t press her. Being a grandmother had unveiled to me another whole dimension to life. A new grandbaby. I could feel a warm happiness bloom inside of me, and I had to resist the urge to dance a jig.
Happiness, what a strange feeling it was.
Right then, I would have given anything to hold a new baby. Babies were all about the future and love and life, and lately my life had been all about death. A secret part of me wanted to shout it from the mountain, but poor Renee was in no state to be joyous or for me to be shouting. “I think with the boys I was sick the morning after conception. For months I could barely brush my teeth past my bicuspids without gagging.” I stood. “I’m sorry you’re going through this. But I’m so very happy about another baby.”
“The room is spinning.” She flopped down the bed and hugged the pillow to her chest, then moaned, “Right now I hate being pregnant.”
She’d get past it. My china doll of a daughter-in-law was breathtakingly beautiful the two times she’d been pregnant. I went into the bath and came out with a cool washrag for her forehead.
“Oh . . . bless you.” She flung her arm over her eyes and lay there. “I’ll just sleep a little bit longer.” Her voice began to drift off. “Then I’ll get Tyler up.”
“No. You stay there. I’ll take the kids today. We’ll go up on the mountain. You can have the whole place to yourself. Just get some sleep.”
I stood up to leave and she said, “Mom? Don’t tell Keely, okay? Last week she was so upset when she started her period.”
“I won’t say anything.” Phil and Keely had been trying to get pregnant again.
“I know I’ll have to tell her eventually, but I don’t want to kick her while she’s down. You know?”
“I understand you don’t want to hurt her, but I don’t think she’d want you tiptoeing around her about this either.”
“They’ve been trying for so long. She’s really stressed over it.”
“Maybe Scott should tell Phil and let him break the news.”
“That might be better, I guess, but please not this weekend. This weekend is about Mike. I’ll be better tomorrow. I want to be there with the family.”
So I spent the day on the lower slopes of the mountain with my grandkids, Tyler in my arms because he was still too young to put on a board and Miranda dressed in her Pepto Bismol-pink jacket and board pants, silver glitter goggles over a beanie with earflaps and white fuzzy pompoms, and riding the Miranda, a board I’d designed with pink and purple graphics, yellow shooting stars and her favorite white, lop-eared bunnies riding snowboards.
We ate corn dogs and fries for lunch and came back to the house mid-afternoon with the kids ready for naps and me looking forward to a half an hour in the steam room in our master, followed by a long hot bath, a glass of wine and a night in front of a roaring fire with a novel.
Instead, the evening was taken over by my kids, who probably needed to blow off steam. Renee was her old self and had cabin fever, so I went along with their plan to eat out. Mickey wanted to stay home with the kids. His ego was on the line because Miranda was beating him on one of the latest X Box games.
After steaks at the casino restaurant, we had split up, the others going off to the lounge shows or a craps table. I stood outside the high-end hotel boutique, eyeing a red Balenciaga handbag in the window before I walked away (the place was closed) and I ended up at a lucky five dollar blackjack table where there were no smokers. Behind me was the constant, distant moaning of Aztec slot machines. I preferred the loud ringing bells and the whirring and spinning noises of those old handle slots. The new digital slots talked to you: they screamed like peacocks and sang surfing songs.
When the casino lounge show started up, I could hear some cowboy singer performing a song about Texas that was popular years back, and I tapped my toes on the stool rail while I sat there wasting time I didn’t care about, winning several hundred dollars from a dealer who loved me because I kept tipping her half my winnings.
Watching her reaction and the pit boss eying the tips stack up gave me more of a thrill than beating the house odds. I really hated blackjack. Close to eleven P.M., I was sipping a gimlet and had just split a pair of aces when the dealer paused. I felt someone standing behind me, then his hands on my shoulders, which was Phillip’s normal way of getting my attention. I was long past ready to go home. I set the drink down, turned around, and came face to face with Spider Olsen.
Going to the Calgary Olympics in 1988 had been a first for us. A lifetime of watching the games on TV had not prepared me for how the games actua
lly worked. Television cameras and satellite transmissions made it easy to flash back and forth between venues, so at home you sat there with a bowl of popcorn in your lap and watched the world’s top athletes compete. I was spoiled, because the drama and anticipation were brought straight into my living room. But I had no idea of the actual logistics, of the massive distances between events, the transportation nightmares, the individual planning and hours wasted trying to get from one event to another.
And if I was frustrated, Mike was ten times worse. It was hell, so everyone blew off steam at night in the Olympic Village bars. Mike and I were still young enough then to party late into the night, and the business was growing fast, the sport spreading like wildfire, so we had something to celebrate. While snowboarding remained an outlaw sport to some, many were finally acknowledging and embracing it. When Mike and I were alone, and sometimes after a little too much to drink, we talked then about our dreams: that maybe someday there would be an Olympic boarding event.
At night, the crowds in the bars were wild, an international mix of revelers celebrating, drinking, and dancing—line-dancing, since the music was top country hits. You would have thought you were in Texas, not Canada.
I’m not a Spider Olsen type. Back then, he was in his late twenties, and I wasn’t. But he’d come on to me twice that night and Mike had jokingly told him to check out another run. But Spider kept drinking, and after a while the bar filled with rowdy, elated and drunk Italians. The gold medalist, Alberto Tomba, was gorgeous, but he was young and his ego was on par with Spider’s. It was pretty ugly in that bar that night. I’ve always felt that the reason Mike and Spider came to blows was because Spider didn’t take losing well or having his nose rubbed in it by Tomba’s crowd. He’d already lost to Tomba in the World Cup prior to the Olympics. But putting his hand down the back pocket of my jeans while Mike’s back was turned wasn’t smart. I pushed him away, but Mike saw it and decked him. That was the last time I saw Olsen in person until Mike’s memorial, which was a day I can barely remember and walked through zombie-like only because I had to.
